It’s the witching hour, and that means it’s time for Agatha All Along. Specifically it’s the season finale, maybe the series finale, the last two episodes, and man, it’s been amazing. If you haven’t seen any of this, go watch it first and then come back, because we’re spoiling the heck out of it.
Who else is going to help me end this out but Mrs. Know-It-All herself. I was blown away by these episodes, genuinely. Between last week’s and the two that just came out, I feel like they did great, and I felt very satisfied.
The Deal With Death
Last week we lost Lilia, and the entire thing begins right there. Agatha’s up above, and she has an encounter with Rio, who we now know to be Death. “First Alice, now Lilia.” “It’s nice she took the Salem Seven with her.”
Death’s issue is that Billy has stolen a life, and that messes with the balance of things. He’s got to go. And because he wants to try to bring his brother back, he’s disrupting the sacred balance all over again. His brother, he wants to do the same cheat, so to speak. That’s what they called it, a cheat. “And I know how you feel about him.” “Oh please, I’ve known that kid for two minutes.”
So Agatha says all right, I’m going to make a deal with you. If I deliver Billy, you let me go. Not only do I get him off this road, I’ll get him to volunteer himself. On top of that, you have to never see me again and give me a long, long, long, long life. Whenever it is that I eventually die, I don’t want to see your face. And Rio’s like, all right, fine.
Jen and Billy finally come back upstairs, they’re all there, they’re ready to go forward, and Agatha is angry. “What fresh horrors await us? It’s the big finish, after all.”
The Road Is a Circle
The entire road is a circle. When they make it to the beginning of the road again, Billy puts his shoes on, and he wakes up in a weird kind of morgue that isn’t labeled. Agatha wakes up, Jen wakes up, several things happen here and there, but at the end of the day Jen finds out Agatha is the one that bound her for a hundred years.
“Are you the one who bound me?”
“I don’t know what you…”
“You nonstop sociopath.”
Jen grabs a bunch of Agatha’s hair, does a spell to get her powers back, and the minute she gets her power back she disappears off the road.
So Agatha’s trying to get Billy to do the same and get her off this road. Let’s get out of here. And he says no. He’s upset, he’s angry about this whole thing. So finally she says okay, fine, have a seat. “Sit down.” “Why?” “We’re going to find your brother.”
She helps him mentally find that place. They find a young man who’s dying somewhere, we don’t know where, and Billy helps Tommy’s energy get into this boy who’s died. As soon as that happens, Billy disappears. He’s gone. He’s done.
That leaves Agatha alone. She opens up her brooch and takes out the lock of hair, and underneath the lock of hair is a tiny seedling, one of those dandelion seeds. When everything was going down, the entire place cracked open, and there was a little run of dirt in the middle of it. She buries the seed, with a tear, and the tear is what waters it. I’m not getting into the whole herbology of it, because tears are salt, but whatever. The thing grows, and eventually she makes it out.
The Literal Kitchen Sink
When she’s out, she faces Death. Rio calls her a coward, and Agatha has to hit the deck, because Rio threw everything at her. The literal kitchen sink went flying. This entire show has just been unreal.
That’s when Billy shows up and protects her. She’s ready to give up. She’s like, I’m done, because Rio is literally saying figure it out, one of you is coming with me. And he, like a putz, volunteers. Which is what Agatha wanted. Here you go, as promised. And he’s like, wait, what’s going on?
At that point he talks to her telepathically and asks if this is how Nicky died. And Agatha turns around, goes up to Rio and kisses her. She accepts the kiss of death, and she dies right there. Boom. Beautiful mushrooms, flowers.
Rio looks over at Billy and says you’re done, get out of here. And he does. He goes home.
It’s Keyser Söze
He’s in his room, and that’s when it dawns on him as he’s looking around. I’ve seen moments like this in other things, and it’s so brilliant. It’s Keyser Söze. It’s The Usual Suspects. It’s the reveal of all the pieces of the puzzle that have been right in front of your face the whole time.
He has the yellow brick road. He has this little leaf mobile. He’s got bronze shoes. The whole bit. He’s remembering more and more, and it literally occurs to him. He’s the son of the Scarlet Witch, and what is the Scarlet Witch? He’s a reality warper. He did the same thing Wanda did in Westview, only he did it local.
Then he turns around, he sees something, and we go to the next episode.
By the way, this is how you do a penultimate episode. And I know, Stan Lee from Nerd Fights out there in my audience, I know you’re like, ah, I told you. You can say last week’s was the penultimate, and as far as I’m concerned these two were all one episode anyway. Generally speaking, the second to last episode is the summation, getting things ready, setting it up. If last week’s was the penultimate, it did a wonderful job setting things up. If the first one this week was, it did an excellent job of being the episode that has the entire climax in it and paves the way for a final episode that’s about the new normal. The wind down. Mrs. Know-It-All called it the epilogue, and that’s a great way to put it. That’s what this final episode was.
How Did We Not See It
I don’t understand how we didn’t see it. I think part of the problem is that Agatha is what’s called an unreliable narrator. You don’t know if she’s telling you the truth or not, because the truth she tells you isn’t always the truth you hear. She’s a liar and a manipulator with a ridiculous history, and we find out the full breadth of that in the final episode. It was unreal when I realized what had happened.
The reason Rio said what she said is that Billy has messed up the balance in the world. So when Agatha takes the seed and her tear, she repeats the cycle of life. Mrs. Know-It-All’s read is that this was her trial, to realize there has to be a cycle of life, because of what happened to her son.
The first thing you have to realize, now that we know a little bit, is that Billy had no control over it. Billy created it, and he wasn’t actually manipulating it. The only manipulation he did was the initial creation in his mind, unwittingly. Everything that happened after that was just rules that were put in place. So the minute each of them did the thing, poof, now they’re out, because they got what they wanted.
Literally, the prize is the friends we made along the way. Seriously. You learn the lessons you were supposed to learn. Jen found out she always had power and it was just bound up by Agatha. Billy helps his brother’s energy, floating out there in the ether somewhere, find a kid who just died, literally how Billy did it himself. And that’s ultimately going to be another thing down the road.
Nicky, and the Song
The final episode starts in the past, and we get what I knew was eventually going to have to happen, which is the backstory. Remember, I said the backstory was going to be the first time Agatha went down the road. The episode starts when she’s pregnant, and it’s her having a kid.
While Mrs. Know-It-All was getting ready, I was online reading other people’s really great but absolutely wrong theories. Agatha in no way, shape or form got her life extended by sacrificing her kid. That did not happen. Her kid was going to die, and Agatha begged Rio not to take him. Just let him live. “My love, please.” “I can offer only time.”
He was supposed to die at childbirth. That should’ve been the end right there. And Rio gave her more time. Six, seven years. She got to raise her little con artist kid, because essentially Agatha is a witch without a coven, and so she goes around killing other witches whatever way she can. The kid lured them in, and she would get them.
Throughout that entire story, she and Nicky are inventing a song. It started out as the winding road, and little by little, as the years progress, they added to it and added to it and added to it. At the very end, Agatha lays down with her kid one last time, and it happens while she’s sleeping.
I like the way they wrote that, by the way. I thought it was merciful. Rio knew Agatha was going to suffer already, and she didn’t want her to suffer like that, to see it. So Agatha wakes up and Nicky’s gone. She buries him, and while she’s burying him and crying and mourning, she’s singing their song. The Witches’ Road.
A Centuries-Long Con
Nicky had just sung it, their last time out, and witches heard it. So someone followed, heard Agatha singing the song, and that’s when inspiration hit, and Agatha began a centuries-long con.
She gets people who are interested in the road and tells them the exact same story we heard in the first episode. You’ve got to have a coven, you’ve got to get them together. Nothing happens. She talks crap to them, they blast her, she sucks their power. Done. That’s what this has all been.
I was going to say I think that might actually be how Alice’s mother died, but I think they said in the series that Alice’s mother died on tour, and that there was a family curse. So that makes more sense.
I was so floored by that revelation. It really cemented everything home.
The Ghost With the White Hair
Right after that we get back to Billy at the end of the previous episode, turning around. Mrs. Know-It-All had said what she hoped was going to happen at the end. Agatha’s a ghost, and she has gray hair. That’s right, she said Agatha needs to show up with that gray white hair at the end. And she looks just like her comic counterpart. Just like it.
She wants the brooch back. She sees Billy, she’s trying to talk to him, and he’s getting pissy about it, because he’s still a teenager and he can’t get out of his own way. She follows him back to her place, he’s trying to banish her, and he’s asking why won’t you leave. And she says, I can’t face him.
He realizes she’s talking about her son, Nicky. He tells her, you know, he’d probably forgive you. And she says that’s really why I like you, because you sound like him when you talk like that. Then she goes, come on, let’s go find your brother.
So they’ve left together, a ghost and Wiccan, the character we know he has fully come to be. Some people think that’s a new series. I don’t think so, or maybe it’s down the road. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a wonderful way to have ended the thing. They ended it kind of open-ended. If they really wanted to, they could, and if not, this is fine too.
And how did we miss that the thing on the floor was a pentagon, like Westview was? There was nothing on it before. That only happened now. So how did we miss it? Good storytelling. They did a good job keeping us enthralled with everything.
In the very end he does get rid of the road, and he puts up a testament to the three witches who died. Agatha tells him to do his math right, because he did save someone’s life. Jen crawls out of the dirt and flies away, right at the Westview sign. And the people of Westview were all coming back out like, oh my God, is it going to happen again? He just ignores them all, gets in his car and drives away.
The Bar for Marvel
My favorite MCU shows right now are Loki seasons one and two, WandaVision and Agatha, not necessarily in that order. I like some others, but those are my three favorites at the moment. They’ve all been powerful.
This needs to be the bar by which the MCU moves forward in terms of putting their shows together. Give it a showrunner. Actually figure out how you want the story to unfold, because this was a really brilliantly told story, and everybody in it experienced things.
I know people talk about Young Avengers. I don’t think Young Avengers is a thing yet. I know they’ve talked a little bit about it, and I think at the very end of The Marvels Kamala goes to visit Riri, or possibly somebody else. Mrs. Know-It-All didn’t see The Marvels, so I’m on my own there.
I love the whole premise that the song was just something to pass the time while you’re walking. She turned it into a thing to lure people in, and Billy turned it into a very powerful spell. I don’t know if she’s more dangerous or less dangerous now that she’s a ghost. I know she’s very realized at the moment, and I’m here for it.
The Verdict
The Agatha All Along finale gets an 8 out of 10 from Mrs. Know-It-All and a 9 out of 10 from me on the Know-It-All Index. We’re counting the last two episodes as one thing, just like we did at the very beginning.
It wasn’t a 10. I think we got our 10 last week. But this was a solid ending. They stick the landing very well, and I was happy and satisfied. You can’t beat that.
Tell me what you thought of how it ended, and if there was a part you liked, let’s talk about it. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
